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Aligning agriculture and climate policy

Nature Climate Change volume 7, pages 307–309 (2017)Cite this article

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The 4‰ initiative to sequester carbon in soils has the potential to connect sustainable development goals, enhance food security and mitigate climate change by utilizing waste organic residues.

Our climate is changing with potentially severe implications for human life if we are not able to limit the global average temperature increase to below 2 °C. Global models indicate that this target can only be met in the long term with negative emissions1, that is, carbon removal from the atmosphere. It has long been suggested that carbon sequestration in soils may be a significant climate mitigation wedge2. Although much research has been devoted to increasing organic carbon (OC) sequestration by managing soils, it has not been part of negotiations for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. However, ahead of COP21, a voluntary action plan was proposed, which included the 4‰ initiative (www.4p1000.org), focusing on soil OC (SOC) sequestration to mitigate climate change and improve food security. Since then, public awareness of soils as C sinks has grown and the possibility of effectively counterbalancing anthropogenic emissions by increasing the OC content of soils has become an attractive alternative to other climate mitigation measures due to its numerous co-benefits. The soils of cultivated ecosystems may serve this purpose because they are already managed for food production, because they present opportunities for restoring SOC stocks due to historical losses, and because organic residues from various sources, often considered as a waste, could be used to build SOC.

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Figure 1: Conceptual diagram depicting C flow in a system with C-use optimization among sectors.
Figure 2

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by and benefited from the European Commission through FP7 projects, Distributed Infrastructure for Experimentation in Ecosystem Research (ExpeER) grant agreement number 262060 and Analysis and Experimentation in Ecosystems (AnaEE) grant agreement number 312690, and the CLAND Convergence Institute funded by ANR. The input of P.S. contributes to U-GRASS (grant number NE/M016900/1) and the Belmont Forum/FACCE-JPI DEVIL project (grant number NE/M021327/1). C.R. received funding from INSU/CNRS (Lombricom project) and ADEME (Vermisol project) and from ANR (MOSAIK, grant agreement no: ANR-12-AGRO-0005). Contributions from L.S. and A.C. were supported by GPLER, contract number SOW12-GPLER-LCR-PM. H.W.L. and M.S.C. acknowledge the National Science Foundation for ongoing support of NEON. The manuscript contributes toward results of the ARC discovery grant 'Carbon Conundrum' (DP140100323).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, URP3F, Lusignan, 86600, France

    A. Chabbi

  2. Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), UMR Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Ecotoxicologie des Agroécosystèmes (Ecosys) Bâtiment EGER, Campus AgroParisTech Grignon, Thiverval Grignon, 78850, France

    A. Chabbi

  3. Soil and Crop Sciences, Cornell University, Bradfield Hall, Ithaca, 14853, New York, USA

    J. Lehmann

  4. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, LSCE, Gif sur Yvette, F-91191, France

    P. Ciais

  5. Battelle-National Ecological Observatory Network, 1685 38th Street, Boulder, 80301, Colorado, USA

    H. W. Loescher & M. SanClements

  6. Institute of Alpine and Arctic Research (INSTAAR), University of Colorado, Boulder, 80301, Colorado, USA

    H. W. Loescher & M. SanClements

  7. Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, Colorado State University, 200 W. Lake Street, Fort Collins, 80523, Colorado, USA

    M. F. Cotrufo

  8. Thünen-Institute Climate-Smart Agriculture, Bundesallee 50, Braunschweig, 38116, Germany

    A. Don

  9. Faculty of Science and Engineering University of Waikato, Hamilton, 3240, New Zealand

    L. Schipper

  10. Department of Environmental Systems Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, 8092, Switzerland

    J. Six

  11. Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Aberdeen, 23 St Machar Drive, Aberdeen, AB24 3UU, UK

    P. Smith

  12. CNRS, Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences Paris, Thiverval-Grignon, 78850, France

    C. Rumpel

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  1. A. Chabbi
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Contributions

A.C. initiated the writing of the paper and led the work. C.R. wrote the first version of the manuscript and prepared the figures. All authors contributed with ideas, and participated in the writing of the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to A. Chabbi or C. Rumpel.

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Chabbi, A., Lehmann, J., Ciais, P. et al. Aligning agriculture and climate policy. Nature Clim Change 7, 307–309 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3286

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